Alex Edler, Brandon Sutter injuries make it a tougher mountain for Canucks to climb

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Willie Desjardins did not even try to sugar-coat the loss of defenceman Alex Edler and centre Brandon Sutter.

“It does make it a much bigger challenge,” the Vancouver Canucks coach said before his team played the Arizona Coyotes on Wednesday night.

That may be an understatement.

Sutter and Edler were sent home Wednesday after suffering injuries in the second period of Tuesday night’s 3-1 win over the Colorado Avalanche. Sutter has a broken jaw, Edler a fractured fibula.

They won’t be back any time soon and Desjardins did not try and pretend that the loss of the two veterans won’t hurt.

“They are difficult injuries in all facets of our game,” Desjardins said. “Right-handed draw man, two guys who are on the first unit (power play). They are big losses.”

They come, of course, at the worst possible time for the Canucks, who had finally got completely healthy. Desjardins said he had a good feeling about his team heading into this two-game road trip and shared his optimism with his players before Tuesday night’s game in Denver.

“Coming into the Colorado game I said, guys, it’s all set for us to start playing good. The guys that were injured had played a couple of games. . .now everybody is back, we’ve had a couple of games, so there’s no reason we don’t start playing the way we can play. That is how I felt. I think the team was excited, the team felt that way.

“Even though we had lost a few, we had played pretty good in those games, we were confident that we were still there in the hunt. Now it’s a matter of finding a way again. You have to battle and you have to stay in it until you come back and get healthy again.”

Desjardins had to make a couple of lineup changes on Wednesday night and one of them figured to be controversial, but was changed before the game when Derek Dorsett was unable to play due to an illness.

As expected, Alex Biega, a healthy scratch for the last two games, stepped in for Edler. But Desjardins’ initial plan was to play Adam Cracknell instead of rookie Jared McCann. That would have been three straight games for McCann as a healthy scratch.

Desjardins said before the game he feared a possible match up against Coyotes centre Martin Hanzal.

“If he gets matched up against Hanzal, that’s a tough matchup for a guy,” Desjardins said. “Hanzal is a big boy. It is going to happen, but I think it’s probably a better matchup at home.”

McCann was inserted into the lineup when Dorsett was unable to play.

Desjardins acknowledged that he will be second-guessed for some of his lineup decisions in the weeks to come. He also said he sometimes second-guesses himself when decisions he makes don’t result in a win.

“There will be second-guessing,” he said. “There are different ways to do it. It’s not like it’s a 90-10 decision, they are not clear cut. They are 50-50 or 60-40, so 40 per cent of the people are going to think you are wrong one way or the other. It’s trying to do what is best for the player and best for the team.

“That is the call. You can go either way and after the game, if you lose, well, you should have gone the other way. I am the first to say, well, that wasn’t the way to go. If you lose, you wished you would have tried something else. But that is the way we are going to go tonight.”

Sutter was playing in just his fourth game after missing 33 games following sports hernia surgery.

“That was just tough luck, it goes off a guy’s skate and bounces the other way and then hits him in the jaw,” Vancouver GM Jim Benning said. “That’s just bad luck. I don’t know what else you can say about it. He has got a visor on and it just hits underneath his visor and hits him in the jaw. He is a good player and we’ll miss him, but we are going to have to figure it out.”

ICE CHIPS: The Canucks recalled defenceman Yannick Weber and winger Alex Friesen from their AHL affiliate in Utica. They will join the team at Friday’s practice in Vancouver.bziemer@vancouversun.com

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Alex Edler, Brandon Sutter injuries make it a tougher mountain for Canucks to climb